What I believe you are responding to is your frustration coming up with sensible answers to the questions I have posed about john motivations, not yours. I have acknowledged you are a feminist and believe it.

It is not saying you want to see women killed (!) to question why you think an acceptable answer to questions about johns’ behaviors is to reprint quotes about prostituted women’s financial assets. It is because I believe you think women are worth more than the sum of their assets that I am depressed, and mystified, seeing you use “48% of those that lived eventually owned homes” as a counterpoint to questions raised about brothel room panic buttons and Swedish johns violence.

However, I am not at all mystified with how pointing my finger ‘o blame squarely at johns sexist behavior gets turned into me attacking women instead of the johns I’m gunning for. I’m quite used to that redirection of my criticisms.. For just one example of many, witness how me asking feminist Devan Barber questions about the motivations of hundreds of voyeur-johns made her knee-jerk a response defending William and Mary College’s Women’s Studies Department and feminist organizations, women who I didn’t mention and whose motives I never questioned because I was too busy setting my sights firmly on johns.

I believe in the good motivations of W&M College’s Women’s Studies Department, feminist organizations, and you. I do not believe in the altruistic motivations you inexplicably ascribe to men who pay for women and children’s sexual submission. You have made it clear you’re not willing to discuss johns, and I’m not willing to speak of prostituted women’s lives solely in financial terms, so there’s little left for us to debate.

Sam, I am not going to continue this debate with you not, although I suspect it is the case, because I don’t think you are listening to my argument – that I want to keep sex workers safe – but because you are refusing to acknowledge that I might be doing this from good motives.

I utterly disagree with you, and I think your stance has the potential to do enormous harm to vulnerable women, but I do acknowledge that you have good intentions. Yet you are not only determined to twist my position, but to attribute to me some ill-defined desire to see women killed, which I find offensive. I will therefore not be continuing to debate with you.

In the paper you’re writing, please do not say that researchers haven’t interviewed prostitutes in brothels legal and illegal, strip clubs, or escorting. Dicker over the validity of the statistics if you want, but saying that all studies on prostitution, except the ones you’re referencing, have been done on street prostitutes is demonstrably false.

You have offered no competing information about how many prostitutes are owned by pimps. You’ve given quotes about how profitable prostitution can be for a minority of prostitutes, but you’ve got absolutely nothing on how grotesquely, unfathomably profitable it is for pimps. Unless you can suggest an alternate percentage, I’ll keep going with 90% of prostitution is pimp controlled.

“The majority of prostitutes choose prostitution as the occupational alternative that affords them the highest attainable standard of living”

I believe this is true. When the average age of entry is 14, yeah, there’s nothing else a 14-year-old can do “occupationally” to make as much money as letting johns rape her repeatedly. Female genital mutilation raises the relative income of girls in Africa too, but that doesn’t make it pro-woman.

Your answer to the other question I asked is also ‘no’, because you can’t come up with any plausible reason why nonviolent johns would suddenly turn violent in Sweden. Why doesn’t your inability to come up with an excuse for this unproven behavior change of Swedish johns not cause you to pause and think hard on just how incorrect you must be if all that fills your head upon pondering the question is “…”?

How does a statistician calculate the lost incomes of murdered prostitutes when figuring out the “considerable economic advances” of prostitution? Gemma Adams was killed in Ipswich at age 25, but their missing income isn’t worked into the statistics as a zero. There is no column in your source:

Income of Gemma Adams: $0
Income of Tania Nicol: $0
Income of Anneli Alderton: $0
Income of Paula Clennell: $0
Income of Annette Nicholls: $0

because marking dead hookers’ income as “0” in the statistics would readily reveal prostitution’s severe-to-deadly harms. Dead prostitutes don’t own homes, and they don’t rent either. Dead prostitutes can’t be tracked for 14 years. Dead prostitutes don’t have “the highest attainable standard of living” because they are not doing any kind of living at any standard.

I reject research that says murdered prostitutes are worth zilch monetarily so their lives just won’t be counted, money apparently being the sole measure of a prostituted person’s life. How depressing that you, a feminist, are okay quantifying prostitutes’ lives the same way pimps and johns do, by focusing on the amount of money each prostitute is worth.

To quote a couple of pieces of information that I’ve been collecting for a paper:

* When Day followed workers in the London industry for 14 years, she found that while a few were still in poverty and struggling to make ends meet, most had made considerable economic advances. Twenty-four out of 50 owned their own homes, more than a third had degree level or vocational training.

“Very few studies have then carried out the obvious step of comparing the sex workers they have studied against a matched group of non-sex workers. As a model, we might consider a study in Canada in 1987 that compared 45 sex workers and 45 controls for an overall scale of mental health. It found that severity of sexual abuse before the age of 16 was a more important predictor of poor health than was being involved in sex work.”

Vanwesenbeeck (1994, 28): “The majority of prostitutes choose prostitution as the occupational alternative that affords them the highest attainable standard of living.” (Not as a result of destitution.)
Vanwesenbeeck, W.M.A. Prostitutes’ Well-Being and Risk, University Press, Amsterdam, 1994.
Day, S. On the Game: Women and Sex Work, Pluto, London, 2007

Why is it so important to you that men sometimes buy boys and men for sex? What difference does it make that an estimated 10-15% of prostituted people are male when a statistically insignificant number of sex buyers are women?

It feels like you’re trying to erase the highly gendered truth of prostitution in order to bolster your position that prostitution is just a job. It has echoes of anti-feminist “but men get raped too!” on it, as if the 10% of male rape victims somehow erases the highly gendered truth that a statistically insignificant number of rapes are committed by women.

If that’s not your intent, can you please explain what your practical intent with pointing out that men sometimes sexually exploit boys and men is?

“work out the method that best protects woman”

How does legalizing men’s rightto sex reduce the rape or murder of prostitutes? Brothels are built with ‘panic buttons’ in them because legitimizing prostitution does not prevent rape. Prostitution was decriminalized in Ipswich but those women were still murdered.

I have asked this before but have never gotten an answer, so maybe you can provide one since you seem to think that johns in Sweden increased their violence after 1999: why would johns who are not violent to prostitutes suddenly become violent towards them because of a change in the law?

I’ve bought marijuana illegally many, many times. The annual late-August dry spell has never led me to feel more violent towards my dealers; I was grateful for getting what I could get. What rationale can you give for why previously nonviolent johns would suddenly beat up their sex dealers?

90% of prostituted women interviewed by WHISPER had pimps while in prostitution (Evelina Giobbe, 1987, WHISPER Oral History Project, Minneapolis, Minnesota).

Do you have any competing information regarding the percentage of prostitutes owned by pimps?

The average age of entry into prostitution in the UK is 14-years-old. You seem to be saying that if society lets men have the whores they want then kerb crawlers will stop torturing, raping and murdering sex workers. Domestic violence and marital rape still happen at epidemic levels despite the legitimacy of husbands.

I am indeed passionate about the women being murdered and forced into prostitution, but I think the way to deal with it is work out the method that best protects woman, rather than lashing out with ineffective laws that actually endanger them.

I’d be interested in the source of your pimping statistic – does it reflect all forms of prostituion, or just street prostitution: in which country, when, in what legal regime?

If you believe that boys are prostituted more than girls then you’ll believe anything you’re told.

“What worries me is how passionate and angry the debate from ‘your’ side often becomes.”

If you’re worried by anti-john advocates being too passionate and angry then you must be positively losing sleep at night worrying about the johns who passionately rape and angrily murder prostituted women in obscene numbers. As a feminist , I’m a lot more concerned about pimps and johns who have passionate, angry emotions which escalate to misogynistic abuse than the debate tone of people who advocate for men’s right to pay for sex, since we’re being purely practical here.

You obviously will disagree, but I do not think it is any kind of compassionate or humanitarian position to say, “I don’t believe men have a right to pay to facefuck poor women, I just believe poor women have the right to get facefucked by as many men as it takes to lift them out of abject poverty.”

Too bad pimps pocket an estimated 90% of prostitution profits, making them the ones who really know how to work sex.

Legalising prostitution makes it safer for everyone concerned.

Nevada has done so for years.

People sometimes have to sell their body because sometimes they want the money. Whether they do it out of necessity or for their own reasons such as a super high sex drive or because they want something that money can buy such as drugs then that is their lookout.

Organised prostitution as part of trafficking and illegal smuggling is easy to spot so you don’t patronise those people.

In fact I once needed a massage from the parlour down the street, I was stressed and they offered “extras” I knew exactly what they meant and I refused and I got my massage and never went back.

It all depends on the circumstances at the end of the day

Would you deny a man or a woman trying to survive off selling themselves…